The present invention relates to rendering glyphs.
A character is an abstract construct that often, although not always, represents an atomic unit in some system of expression, such as a language. Each character can be represented by a set of character attributes that define the semantic information of the character. A character encoding associates the set of character attributes for a character with a particular encoding value—for example, a scalar value included in a character set standard, such as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchanges) or Unicode.
A glyph is a visual representation of a character, such as a graphical token or symbol. A glyph image is a particular image of a glyph that has been rasterized or otherwise imaged onto some display surface. A font is a collection of glyphs, and can include one or more corresponding mappings of glyphs to characters (i.e., to encoding values). A font is typically constructed to support a character set standard. That is, fonts include glyphs representing characters included in the character set standard. A glyph can be associated with a set of glyph attributes defining appearance information for a representation of the corresponding character, and generally provide the information necessary to render the glyph. A glyph can include, or can be associated with, a set of instructions for rendering the glyph. For example, TrueType™ fonts, available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., include glyphs that are associated with a set of instructions for use when rendering the glyph. A TrueType font program can include a component used for font-wide calculations and a per-glyph component used for rendering a specific glyph within the font.
Hinting is a method of defining which pixels are turned on in order to create the best possible glyph bitmap shape, particularly at small sizes and low resolutions. A glyph's outline determines which pixels will constitute the bitmap. It is often necessary to modify the outline to create the bitmap, i.e., modify the outline until the desired combination of pixels is turned on. In certain fonts, such as TrueType fonts, a hint is a mathematical instruction that is included in the font program that defines a distortion of a glyph's outline under particular rendering conditions.
Certain types of visual output devices for computer systems are capable of outputting in “gray scale”. That is, each of the pixels in the raster matrix of the output device is capable of displaying a number of tones, typically from pure light to pure dark. Anti-aliasing is a technique of varying the gray scale or color values of the pixels representing a glyph image to provide the illusion of smoother curves and less jagged diagonal lines. Referring to FIGS. 1 and 2, an anti-aliasing technique can downsample a high resolution bitmap 105 to generate a gray scale representation 205 of a glyph image, the gray scale representation having varying tones of gray. For example, the ratio of the high resolution to the device resolution can be 4 to 1 in both x and y directions, illustrated by the grid 110 shown in FIG. 1, which grid corresponds to the device resolution. The device resolution is the maximum number of individual pixels that can be displayed on the computer output device used to display the corresponding glyph image. This technique, referred to herein as 4×4 anti-aliasing, provides the same “degree” of anti-aliasing in both x and y directions.